My take on it is different. We are so inundated with media sources, that every point of view is represented, no matter how diverse. But more than that, these media sources are competing for our attention. Didn’t Ariana Huffington sell her site for $200 million?
So, the pornographers, the Rush Limbaughs, the Huffington’s, the Fox’s, the Daily Show, the religious right, the radical left… it goes on and on… They are all screaming at us, and trying to bring us into their audience. There is money to be made. There is a point of view to be heard. The voices are strident. And, they have learned that if they distort information to match the expectations of their audience, then the audience becomes more loyal… but unfortunately more isolated in the POV of the media provider.
In the case of porn, there are very few youngish people who have not seen enough sexual diversity on the internet, that pretty much anything becomes “normal”.
We live in this world surrounded by distortions, which are passed off to us as if they were truth.
There may be something else at work here. 160 years ago, the Catholic threat was taken very seriously as something that would undermine the Protestant values of the US. Around the same time, it was stated in major publications that the Irish were a similar threat, accounting for 70% of crime. Over time these immigrants assimilated.
Now that their POV is part of the mainstream, then the next generation is taking over, with their POV. This is very disturbing, but it is just the normal evolution of our society. Yesterday’s Catholic is today’s gay person, in that sense. Today’s Catholic is yesterday’s Protestant conservative. Same phenomenon, different players. And the cycle will repeat every few generations.